It's gonna be very interesting to see what comes out of it. Some great people making the journey. There may be a great advantage to have a crew that stays in a hackerspace and focusses for an extended period
Choose this as an entry point to say something. I agree with the battleship analogy to a point but I don't think it would be very hard to turn around. Not when compared to building rocket ships or many other things we do at scale.
I grew up on a UK small holding sheep farm (2-400). In the 80s it was possible to raise a small family largely thanks to the benefit system.
As I see it hobby farmers are all we need for sheep production. I agree that we need a degree of livestock but we need to transition to reducing our consumption of meat hugely. Much of the land currently used for livestock should be converted to forest and forest garden communities as soon as possible.
There a problem with consumer awareness. If consumers cared about pesticides in their food, or food miles, or dependence on foreign imports (on an island nation) then the locally produced food would be more viable. However most consumers are so heavily hypnotised by modern consumerism there only desire what is persuasively advertised which means sexy new 'phones' and not poison free vegetables.
Control of food and water gives certain control of people. Only a small percentage of the population is really aware of what it takes to make enough food to stay alive. Large corporate forces now control policy and effectively the market condition in most respects so small scale passionate farmers are best of not trying to engage with the commodity markets. If the UK leaves the EU and there is a major global conflict people will quickly start to realise the value of local food.
I'm mostly interested in how we can reduce the labour overhead in the this kind of small scale farming. At EMF camp I saw an brilliant example of someone building their own open source horticultural robot. It will be at https://pretix.eu/farmhackwales2018/fhw2018/
i think there are big issuses on the horizon here, it's going to get increasingly difficult to find simple problems that humans can solve and not bots. i'm not sure there is a fundemental answer
we're hiring web developers. Must know some JS, but other than this we're not too fussy on experience. (though someone who knows AngularJS would be great).
we just got our first major contract to produce a mobile app for the local health board. Funded for 2 years by the UK innovation agency and the health board have been blown away by our approach, i we think we have a product.
We're looking for someone who is interested in moving to Gwynedd, North West Wales,UK (accomodation on landing can be arranged) and joining our group. You could be a junior webdev, or have more experience. We on the edge of the Snowdonia National Park, not far from Bangor.
Without being immodest I think we're pretty innovative. We're building our HQ inside a disused Methodist chapel with a Pirateship theme. And particularly interested in culture change, sustainability, "cybernetic" working...
(ps: if youre really keen an interesting in backend systems integration (HL7 messaging) drop us a line too.
our current website is not much to look at because we've been flat out securing the current project, but we are a credible outfit.
We're partnered with http://cognitive-edge.com who are global thought leaders in Complex Adaptive Systems.
if youre looking for an adventure, drop us a line.